“My breath caught in my throat. He was so handsome, it honestly caught me off guard.”

Phil is my high school sweetheart. The first day of my senior year, I walked into what I thought was my P.E. class. It turned out to actually be a weightlifting class as I immediately noticed I was the only female in the room. I turned around to leave when he walked in. My breath caught in my throat. He was so handsome, it honestly caught me off guard. He was the one. I just knew it. Tall, dark and handsome, truly my dream guy in every sense of the word, right down to his dimples. I stayed in weightlifting class needless to say. I discovered at the time that he was talking with a girl from CA who he met at camp that summer. We became fast friends after discovering we had multiple classes together and that we only lived 5 minutes from each other. Phil took me to homecoming, met my family and helped me through a very painful time in my life. He truly became a best friend, all the while staying true to the girl he was talking to. Looking back, it was a blessing that he was talking with someone else at the time because it allowed us to become friends. We developed this very deep, genuine friendship that is still our foundation to this day. Four months later he took me out to dinner, gently pulled my hands into his and told me he had broken it off with his summer camp girl. His next words are still played perfectly in my head to this day, “I want to be with you forever Michelle.” That was 6 years ago (married for 1.5), and I’m still as twitterpated now as I was then.